Although I’ve been on sabbatical this semester, it appears that our experiment using Chromebooks in our introductory biology courses has been going well. From what I’ve heard, only a few students have been burned by the extra layer of abstraction of running Windows in a web browser, occasionally closing the Chrome tab instead of just the program running in the virtual Windows environment. All told, I’d say that’s pretty impressive for an idea I dreamed up last winter, made possible by the excellent support from our IT department.
I can only imagine this is the early days of a growing trend, both within and beyond academic settings. I noticed a few days ago that Adobe has been working with Google to make their flagship application, Photoshop, available in a “virtual” environment. It sounds like an unholy combination of virtualization, VNC, and JavaScript, but it might work well enough to be worth it. Interesting, too, that Google is investing engineering resources to make this happen, as this clearly increases the value of Chromebooks if it can provide an adequate user experience.
While this is an example of making a particular program run virtually, Amazon continues to push forward with their more general solution, called AppStream. They’ve just announced the ability to run almost any Windows application on their virtualization platform, removing the need to manage a server on site. It costs $0.85 per hour, billing only for the time used. I’m not sure it would make sense for every app or student or teacher, but for certain programs that need to be run only occasionally, it seems like a great idea.
Gravitropic 